Macworld.Ars: NewsGator to get your attention in 2008

NewsGator's NetNewsWire and FeedDemon will use your attention data in 2008 to …

The future of news readers seems inexorability linked with the past of the web browser. It's hard to believe today that companies once charged money for an application to surf the web. But that trend is going the way of the dodo with news readers. Google, Bloglines, Yahoo!, and a slew of desktop-based clients have given away their interfaces to other people's content for a while now, and only recently have the "old guard" taken steps in the same direction. While Brent Simmons and NewsGator have always offered a stripped-down version of their software for free, the company that owns, markets, and integrates the features of several cross-platform and platform-specific desktop aggregators has decided to make the applications themselves free.

And this was a very recent decision, as Brent Simmons (developer of NetNewsWire) and Nick Bradbury (developer of FeedDemon) told me this morning at Macworld. The decision to give all of their desktop clients and syncing services away for free was made approximately at the beginning of December, and took hard work throughout the busy holiday season to make happen. This hasn't been a universally well-received announcement, though. Many independents have prematurely declared the market for smaller or niche RSS readers to be over. Brent Simmons doesn't believe this is so. Simmons mentioned that Apple already ships two free clients (Safari and Mail) with the operating system, but there's still no lack of online, free options. In fact, both Bradbury and Simmons claim that when Windows and Apple released their free RSS clients, they saw either an increase in sales (NNW) or no effect at all (FeedDemon).

"What's going to keep NewsGator in business?" you might ask yourself. The future of news aggregation is the enterprise, attention, and social interaction. What does that mean? NewsGator will make money by selling its enterprise products, and will improve and enhance their customer's experiences by taking advantage of "attention data." Brent Simmons told me that almost every interaction you make in respect to your subscriptions and individual news items can be factored. Flagging, taking clippings, deleting and adding subscriptions, clicks, number of items read, and more can be recorded and used to make you a more productive news consumer.

Imagine, for example, having to sort and filter through 1,000 unread items. True, you may have your feeds sorted into folders, but it's still a massive undertaking for even the most savvy information consumers. Most people would rather mark all their items as read than deal with it. With attention data, your news reader can build a profile of the items you most commonly read, make correlations, and only show you those items that are most likely to interest you, leaving the "uninteresting" items to float to the bottom. NetNewsWire has tracked attention data for a while now and has allowed users to sort your subscriptions by "attention," but the features in upcoming versions of NetNewsWire and FeedDemon are far more advanced.

One such feature is a new view of your subscriptions that apes the popular TechMeme website. TechMeme is an automated process that tracks and displays the most popular news stories at any given time. In addition, TechMeme shows all coverage and sites who link to the "original" or most popular versions. The new view in FeedDemon—soon to be integrated into NetNewsWire—does exactly this, except that instead of drawing sources from the whole Internet, the "Popular Stories" feature will pull from your own handpicked, set of subscriptions.

And this isn't the end. Both Simmons and Bradbury believe that the future of news aggregators lies at least partially in the realm of social networking. Sharing interesting stories to your friends and receiving reading recommendations drawn from your own and your friends' reading habits are features that have privacy considerations, as observed by Google's own speedbump. These issues will be smoothed over eventually (Google has already cleared up a majority of the complaints), and it looks like the big players in these markets will be banking on the future of social news reading and attention data for the foreseeable future.